When Bernie Sanders famously said: “Enough of those damned emails,” many thought they’d heard the death-knell of that wearisome argument. Just this week, President Obama referred to it as “all that noise,” designed to confuse new voters about Hillary’s trustworthiness. The concept of “noise” comes from cybernetics and it refers to anything that interferes with a message sent by one party to another–we laymen also know it as static. Sad to say, we are all familiar with static on our cell phones which keep us from hearing the other person’s words and messages. The static in this case, as we all know by now, are the dark references to some of Hillary’s emails. Of the emails, President Obama also noted that while Clinton, while serving as his Secretary of State, made an “honest mistake” by using a private email server, as it was now “being blown up into just some crazy thing,” which will affect new voters when they hear “all that noise.” Why now, you may ask, all of this focused static. Well,...

After having become the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, the latest polls show that Donald Trump has received a bump in the polls, and is nearly tied with Hillary Clinton. Since Hillary held a large, if not commanding, lead over Trump just a couple of weeks ago, this has many Clinton supporters in near panic. What does this recent surge by Donald really mean? For one thing upon becoming either party’s standard-bearer, candidates usually receive a bump in the polls. The same thing happens following the party conventions in the summer. These latter poll jumps are most often short-lived as one party convention is followed in short order by the other’s. However, understanding the bump that the winning candidate gets in the polls upon becoming a party’s presumptive nominee is a bit more complicated, since there is often a significant period when the primary races are over between parties. Let’s take look at the mechanics of this kind of poll bump. During the primary campaign, a significant number of supporters of the...

Donald Trump once again has threatened not to support the Republican nominee if it is not himself. This should come as no surprise whatsoever to anyone who has followed the erratic and vindictive utterings by the Republican front runner. What should be noted, however, is the nature of Trump’s following, especially those who are part of a backlash to what he has regularly hammered at, namely: “political correctness.” The appeal of Trump’s attacks on political correctness can mean a lot of different things. Most come under the heading of simple decency and respect for all of one’s fellow humans. Polls indicate that a majority of Americans support decency and respect, even to individuals whose lifestyle is not something they are comfortable with. Yet, as Trump’s support demonstrates, a sizable number have been mobilized into a backlash against having to be politically correct. Here, I am not talking about having to call a postman (or a postwoman) a postal person. No! It is clearly a backlash with racial and...

It took Mormon Utah to say no to Donald Trump’s bombastic, boastful, bullying, and vulgar campaign style. That was the message from Tuesday’s primaries. Those who identify themselves as Born Again and Evangelical Christians continued to vote for Trump in Arizona, as they have across the South. Not so in Utah where Trump was overwhelmingly rejected by Republican voters. Utah is about 65 percent Mormon. Ted Cruz, himself an Evangelical Christian, won largely Mormon Utah, Tuesday, with an overwhelming 69.2 percent of the vote, thereby garnering all of its 40 delegates to the Republican convention. He lost Arizona with a large evangelical population In Utah, Donald Trump finished a distant third, behind John Kasich with only 14 percent of the caucus vote. In raw vote terms, Cruz won over 122,100 voters , in Utah, to Trump’s 24,782. Idaho is another state with a large Mormon population. In Idaho, Ted Cruz earlier won with 45.4 percent of the vote to Trump’s 28.1 percent (with Rubio still in the race when Idaho voted, he...

On the eve of Tuesday’s important Republican debate, all eyes, once again, are on Donald Trump. As most readers of this blog are aware, early last week Trump made his most inflammatory anti-Muslim proposal to date*, calling for: “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States (until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on).” He compounded the invective by citing, as precedent, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. His proposal followed the bombings in Paris and the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California. By applying a religious test for admission, most constitutional scholars felt that it was unconstitutional. Others noted that the internment of Japanese-Americans is considered one of the darkest governmental acts in U.S. history. Condemnation of Trump was immediate. Nearly all Republican leaders and candidates (with the notable exception of Ted Cruz) denounced Trump’s proposal as “un-American,” “disgusting,” “not who we are,” and much worse. Several said it disqualified him from being the Republican nominee. He was, many said, playing...

December 12 UPDATE–CBS released their national poll that more or less confirmed the CNN poll results cited below. Therefore, we can remove the outlier label from the latter poll. Two polls now have Trump’s national numbers in the mid-thirties–a significant threshold, if he maintains those numbers. It should be noted that CBS finished their polling before Trump’s controversial proposal to prevent all Muslims from entering the country. So we haven’t yet seen the effect of the immediate and widespread criticism of Trump and his latest proposal. More on that below, it is worth noting that Trump hotels and buildings in Dubai and other of our allied Islamic countries have removed his name from the properties, and they have banned sales of Trump’s branded merchandise. So much for him being the great unifier who will get moderate Islamic countries to do the ground fighting in Syria against ISIS. Trump is oft likened to the far Right Le Pen, in France, who today added her voice to those who are rejecting Trump’s ideas....